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'The Walking Dead' Review: How Season 3 Went Wrong

We’ve come a long ways from the early days of AMC’s ‘The Walking Dead’ and the show has strayed too far from its roots.

Update: I will need to write a Part Two review after the season finale. Virtually every one of my complaints in this post has been addressed in subsequent episodes, and Season 3 has been back on track with a vengeance. I’m extremely glad to see this, and have been enjoying the second half of Season 3 immensely.

There are many reasons for the decline of Season 3. What began as a tense fight for survival in a walker-infested prison quickly devolved into a series of small, disjointed conflicts too easily resolved and forgotten.

For the purposes of this review, we’ll take a look at some of the season’s most important conflicts and discuss why, at least so far, they haven’t worked. Note, these conflicts—to me at least—have succeeded in overshadowing and upstaging what is theoretically the central conflict of the season between our merry band and The Governor.

Rick vs. Rick vs. Lori vs. The World

I don’t buy Rick’s transformation from the good sheriff to either the angry dictator or the crazy hot-head. Nor do I like this transformation.

Rick has become in many ways the “anti-hero.” Done properly, the anti-hero can be a fascinating character.

Take Walter White from AMC’s Breaking Bad.

Walter gradually slips from upstanding citizen and high school chemistry teacher into ruthless meth cook. The transformation is gradual and believable and littered with foreshadowing. It’s not just that a good person becomes bad in Breaking Bad; it’s that this “good person” always had the potential to go bad in the first place.

Walter’s pride is his undoing, and when you watch the series a second time you see the clues of his hubris and pettiness in glaring detail.

But Rick Grimes is not Walter White. In the first two seasons he was the voice of reason, a calm presence and an earnest leader. Suddenly, in Season 3, we are to believe that he’s simply “snapped.” We are made to believe it was the betrayal and forced killing of Shane that has caused this; or the affair that wasn’t actually an affair between Shane and Lori.

I can’t choke down this much suspension of disbelief. I can’t accept a magical metamorphosis.

I don’t want the main character to just “snap” and change personalities overnight. His aversion to Lori felt beyond forced, out of character. It was a set-up for his later guilt, but it ended up making that later guilt feel just as forced.

While I could buy this sort of snap after Lori’s death, I can’t buy it at the beginning of the season (and the end of Season 2) and Rick’s character has become hard to watch and harder still to believe.

Worse, his faltering mental state is less interesting and I care much less about it thanks to the way the show’s writers transformed Rick for the first half of the season.

The decision to make Andrea a primary character with her very own central plot is perhaps the worst decision The Walking Dead creators have made in the entire run of the show. The only hopes of making it a mildly interesting narrative died with Dale in Season 2.

Andrea’s character has slipped from merely irritating and stubborn (in the first two seasons) to willfully blind and a terrible judge of character (in the first half of season 3) to flat-out ridiculous and awful in Sunday night’s episode when she decided that she’d stick around in Woodbury after the Governor pitted two of her friends (the Dixon brothers) against one another in a fight to the death.

She should have listened to Michonne in the beginning. Then again, it would hardly be fair to lay the blame for that entirely at Andrea’s feet.

Michonne, a katana-wielding warrior who rescued and cared for Andrea all winter, is basically incapable of normal human communication. There is no reason for this other than to create dramatic tension. The writers have simply decided to make it impossible for her to say perfectly normal things. Either she is meant to be very stupid or she is supposed to be the “silent type.”

But really, Michonne’s communication skills (or lack thereof) point to a much deeper problem with the show itself: communication errors are the root of all evil. While bad communication and the fallout of bad communication are a real world problem and a necessary narrative tool, at this point in The Walking Dead, communication failure is constant and unbelievable.

As blogger Jason Bittel writes, “You have so many sources for good, natural drama and yet they keep going back to the tactic used by daytime soaps—something happens to thwart sensible communication and everybody has to run around screaming for a few episodes until they can sit down and talk it out. It’s perpetually Act 3 of a rom-com.”

That Michonne has still not fully opened up about what happened in Woodbury and before is painfully nonsensical.

The only thing more nonsensical in the season thus far has been every single one of Andrea’s decisions, reaching fever pitch with Sunday’s episode and her mind-numblingly awful speech to the town peasants, all of whom suddenly believed, for no good reason whatsoever, that leaving the fortified town would somehow be a safer choice.

I’m not surprised to feel such intense dislike for Andrea who has always been a bad character, but Michonne had potential to be a real bad-ass zombie hunter. My real disappointment with Andrea is that she was chosen to be such a central figure at all. Which brings us to….

The Writers vs. The Audience

Here’s the thing, audiences will forgive a great deal. We will quite easily believe that the world has been overrun by zombies, and that some people have survived while most others have not. We can buy the silly magic science that caused all this.

What we can’t buy are characters who we don’t believe and can’t sympathize with. The show has taken enormous pains to kill off or scare away most of the likable characters (and virtually all of the black characters, for that matter) and it’s done so in a way that leaves us with a cast we don’t care to spend time with.

Now even the easy-going Glenn is sunk into his own despair. Rick is a madman. Hershel is not merely crippled, he serves no real function outside of sitting around at the prison. Andrea is an idiot. Michonne is an idiot. Daryl is a good character, but the show had to resurrect Merle and so off goes Daryl (for now) leaving us with basically Carl.

Now, if the show did something surprising—say the Governor killed Rick and then season 4 was all about Carl taking revenge, planning some mad guerrilla warfare against the Woodburians—maybe it could save itself from itself.

But at this point, we’ve had all set-up and no pay off. We had the original conflict with the prisoners that quickly dissipated. Why didn’t they stretch that conflict out? Why move on so quickly? There was an interesting drama to be had between the prisoners and the refugees, but instead it’s turned into several smaller dramas, a new pack of refugees, a conflict between the prison and Woodbury, a new baby, and on and on and on.

How can a show feel at once so dragged out and full of so many easy resolutions all at the same time?

Fundamentally, The Walking Dead has lost its way. It lost its way for the first time when it took the characters to the CDC; then again as it languished forever at Hershel’s farm; and now again as it squats its way through the prison. The show is best while it is on the move.

If the show insists on staying put, then its dramatic tension needs to be sustained by being heightened at a reasonable pace. Introducing side conflicts simply in order to drag out the longer conflict is a cheap trick. Sometimes the show feels like an episodic series masquerading as a story with a longer narrative arc. In that sense, it reminds me a bit of the shortcomings of Lost.

And so I tiptoe toward next Sunday with some trepidation. I want very badly to enjoy The Walking Dead, but I find that harder and harder to do. And really, when I think about it, I’ve found it harder and harder ever since the very first few episodes.

The moments early on in the show—Rick’s mercy killing of the zombie crawling through the park; the inability of the man he meets to shoot his zombie wife—were the best. That sense of something new, of a different way of looking at the zombie apocalypse, of a more human side to it all, is gone.

I think the show can come back from the brink. I do believe it still has the potential to become what it once appeared to be. But Sunday night’s episode has me worried that we are heading in another direction entirely.

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Terrible post. Is the walking dead not the most popular and watched show on television now? Was Lost not one of the most popular shows of this era as well? You lost all credibility with me when you dog on this show and lost. The tv show is not trying to completely remove itself from the comics as the above poster stated. Do I like what Rick has become no, but he and Darryl are my favorite characters. Do I think Andrea is a good character no so I agree there, but this is still good television and the world proves you wrong.

I have hopes that the writers will allow us to learn more about Michonne – she is potentially fascinating, but the show doesn’t seem to want to allow strong and smart women characters. Still waiting and continuing to watch.

Fair comments…I agree that season 3 is all over the place. Personally, I think season 2 was excellent; it developed characters and resulted in a great pay-off with the season finale. The farm burned and we really cared about what happened next to the characters. Season 3 seems like cotton candy – lots of gore and shooting and not much character or story development.

However, I thought The Suicide King was a return to season 2′s slower pace and emphasis on character development, and more particularly, an examination of how people would feel and react in a post-apocalyptic world.

Season 2 had some real high points. The freeing of the zombies in the barn was just…wow. And the end was great. The problem is that it spent far too much time at the farm. They need to be on the move for more of that season. The farm would have been a great second half of a season rather than an entire season.

Yeah, for all it’s problems, season 2 has the best character in terms of arc and complexity (Shane) and two of the best individual episodes since the pilot (the mid season finale and the season finale). It can’t really be overstated that there is a reason it’s the finales that were good, and that reason is the build-up.

However, season 3 is pretty much set in stone. They can only drag out the showdown between the prison and woodbury for so long before all the show’s momentum dies. The buildup is already in place, stopping it all for character development will seem like filler.

I have had multiple people share the same sentiments with me as some of you have on here concerning the final scene of S3E9. I told them to watch it again and understand all of the elements being played there. They did, and every single one of them understood what happened and actually loved the scene. TV shows fortunately aren’t supposed to make you go back and have to analyze them, but that scene I believe if re-analyzed, will change some of your opinions on it.

I agree on almost all points, except for the fact that, so far as I can tell, all these problems have been endemic from the show’s beginning. Dialogue has always been stony, characters have never been developed in any meaningful way. This was easy to forgive in Season 1, when the plot moved apace, and the constant wash of new characters meant we never had to begrudge the writers for how poorly developed each of them was.

Season 2 was a disaster. Essentially stopped on one plot point, we, the audience, were forced to reckon with how shallow and one-dimensional each of these characters are, and how artificial each move in character development is. The show was trying to be something it wasn’t, and the writers refused to recognize its strengths and weaknesses.

I was so disappointed with Season 2 that I didn’t bother to watch the first half of Season 3 until the blizzard hit last weekend. None of these problems are fixed with Season 3. None of them. But this season is… badass. Watching the group as a honed undead-killing machine, the fast-paced action and the new influx of characters made the first half of the season hyper-entertaining. Not thoughtful, not well-written, no characters I particularly care about (except Glen), but entertaining.

When I first started watching the show, I had hopes that it could be great TV. But it isn’t. It’s entertaining TV. It isn’t Breaking Bad, Mad Men or Homeland. Season 3 plays to what strengths it does have: action, horror, adventure. The plot is cartoonish, the characters are uninteresting. But so long as there continues to be scenes like the prison clear-out and the Woodbury terror attack, I’ll keep watching, with full recognition that I will never include it in my pantheon of favorite TV dramas.

I’m genuinely unsure as to whether or not this review is a wind up or just a complete misunderstanding of the world that’s created in The Walking Dead.

How dare Rick lose his sanity! I mean, he’s woken from a coma into a world overrun by cannibalistic zombies…found his wife and son against all odds…assumed leadership in a world with no real rules (other than survival)…seen his son almost killed…killed his best friend…killed other people…been on the run scavenging for months…seen the remains of his wife who was eaten by a zombie…fathered a child…gone on a deadly mission to save his friends…I suppose he should really sit back and reflect on it for a while until his head’s straight, maybe make an appointment to see a counsellor. That goes for the rest of the characters too, I suppose. They’re behaving quite irrationally in this pleasant, thriving world.

I suppose too that Andrea should have listened to Michonne (even though she had absolutely no reason to do so). Glenn is another one who is in despair for no real reason (other than being physically beaten, fighting off a zombie with his hands tied to a chair, being moments from execution and thinking his girlfriend was raped by the Governor). I’d take all of that in my stride I think, can’t understand why he’s so upset. It must be my human side being able to process it (in this rational world, sans zombies). As for Carl’s vendetta against Woodbury, maybe there are people who would follow a thirteen year old boy into battle…

Have to agree that they’ve killed off some of the best characters though. The show hasn’t been the same for me since Shane was killed, largely due to consistently superb acting from Jon Bernthal – but even he had to die to serve the story (and other acting commitments).

Nice nostalgic trip about the first episode to be fair. It was great back in the good old days (before the story evolved).

But let’s blame the writers, rather than our own inability to get lost in this crazy, crazy world..